Eli Whitney and the Cotton (En)gin(e)

Human ingenuity often has a ripple effect on our lives and our politics, and a perfect example is Eli Whitney’s ingenious invention, the cotton “engine” (subsequently shortened to “gin”), which he patented this week (March 14) in 1794. While there had been variations on the “Cotton Gin” before Whitney’s, his prototype worked so well on American cotton it changed America forever.

Before Whitney’s invention, “cleaning” cotton — that is, removing the seeds from the fiber — had been done by hand, a slow, expensive and inefficient process that had prevented cotton from becoming a viable cash crop even though the increasing number of textile mills springing up in New England, and in Europe — England especially — were begging for more cotton to turn into a variety of finished products.

By contrast, Whitney’s cotton gin mechanically separated seeds from fiber, making the process efficient and cheap. The implications for the South, which had both the abundant land and the warm weather needed to grow cotton, were immediately recognized. The cash crop of much of the South, tobacco, was somewhat on the wane, so the cotton gin could make cotton a profitable crop and benefit the entire southern economy.

But separating cotton seeds from fiber was one thing. Planting and picking the cotton plant was another. That required lots of labor, meaning lots more slaves.

Which was sadly ironic because, by 1794, slaves had been slowly decreasing in population in America, including in the South. Prior to 1794, in the South as well as the rest of the country, there had been enough white laborers, especially poor immigrants, willing to work for low wages, reducing the necessity of owning slaves. What’s more, a growing number of southerners began to have misgivings about the contradiction between the principle of freedom on which America had been founded and the bondage in which slaves were held. Finally, especially in the South, there had been a fear that ever increasing numbers of slaves meant the possibility of slave insurrections as their numbers grew.

The cotton gin changed all of that. By the turn of the century the number of cotton bales produced in America had grown to 100,000 — up from about 3,500 in 1794. More to the point, while in 1794 there had been about 700,000 slaves in the country, by 1810 (which was two years after the Constitution had banned the slave trade) there were more than 1 million slaves.

And as the slave population grew, increasing numbers of southerners looked to extend slavery into the new territories that would soon enter the Union as states, which increasing numbers of northerners found objectionable. The result was the Civil War. Talk about human ingenuity affecting our lives and politics.

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